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There I was looking through Google Images at spider after spider—and I an arachnophobe since early childhood. I was searching for an eight-legged creature that might plausibly be found in the rice paddies of Guangdong, China. In my academic writings on the history of agricultural science, I just note the significance of spiders for controlling insect pests and move on. But now the illustrator of the book I had written for children wanted to know what the spider in our story should look like. The hours I spent looking for a suitable spider served as a kind of exposure therapy. I’m less afraid of them now than I ever remember being. I’m also more aware of just how many things I don’t know in my area of expertise: the history of agricultural science in socialist China.

In fact, “exposure” makes a good overarching theme for my journey in writing Moth and Wasp, Soil and Ocean: Remembering Chinese Scientist Pu Zhelong’s Work for Sustainable Farming. The title itself—its absurd length and characteristic format—marks me inescapably as an academic. My name on the cover and photo on the back flap has also exposed something deep that my colleagues avoid discussing but many other people want to know: how does a white woman with a German last name, born and raised in the US, claim to speak about the experiences of Chinese people? Academics rarely question one another’s authority to speak on “our” subjects. Suddenly I have to confront just how much I depend on those three letters (Ph.D.) and how little they can mean outside academic circles.

In children’s book publishing, if the author does not have ethnic credibility, the illustrator needs to make up for it. (This is standard in the industry; my publisher did not make it up!) So the editor found and hired a talented new illustrator named Melanie Chan. As it turned out, Melanie was not Chinese either—her husband’s family was. Another exposure, this time of American assumptions about race and authenticity: Melanie’s authority exceeded mine by just one letter (C-h-a-n to my P-h-D).

And yet, Melanie is connected to China in ways that enriched the book tremendously, and her name was the clue to that connection. Her husband’s ancestral village is in a part of Guangdong not that far from where our story takes place, which meant she could draw on the knowledge of her in-laws and on her own visits to the area. Less tangibly, Melanie’s aesthetic sensibility appears satisfyingly “Chinese” not just to Americans, but to people in China as well. Academics might see this as evidence undermining essentialist views of culture: despite our different social positions and relations to political power, we each inherit a cultural heritage far more diverse than usually recognized. My non-academic Chinese friends would more likely point to yuanfen—the cosmic connection that brings people together, often against the odds. It’s what they often generously use to underscore the rightness of my being in China; maybe it’s also what brought Melanie and me together in this picture book on insect control in Guangdong.

One of my goals in the book is to share with children an example of Chinese people working for environmental sustainability, in contrast to the images of Chinese polluters that dominate Western media. I am also excited to introduce a way of thinking about scientific knowledge—as produced by scientists and farmers working together—that was characteristic of socialist-era China. But within the worlds of publishing and education, the most fundamental purpose of such a book is to “expose” young readers to China. To accomplish such exposure, the book has to look immediately and recognizably “Chinese,” which means clearly different from the worlds inhabited by the target audience.

But what “looks Chinese”? The line between iconic and stereotypic proves troubling. Peasants in conical hats scream “China” to American audiences, but that is a stereotype—perhaps deriving from the history of the US war in Vietnam. The hats of farmers in Guangdong are too similar to our own straw hats to “look Chinese,” so we needed to find other visual cues for the cover. Meanwhile the design concept that Melanie originally chose for the borders (intricate, polished wood carvings) “looked Chinese” and reached the bar of cultural authenticity in a broad sense, but I felt the carvings represented too elite an aesthetic for 1970s rural China. In the end Melanie found a perfect alternative: the art of paper cutting is recognizably Chinese, “traditional,” and yet folksy enough that it was affordable for Chinese rural people and easily accommodated within revolutionary politics.

In truth, few picture book authors are allowed as much contact with illustrators as I had. An important part of the editor’s job is to prevent pushy authors from squashing the artist’s creativity. Contrary to what many people assume, picture book illustrators are not there to draw what the author dictates; they are full partners in the creative process. In our case, Melanie brought a whole new angle to the depiction of history: she conceived of the narrator actively curating his memories by painting pictures, tearing pages from his field notebooks, cutting out photographs, and assembling all of these, along with the paper cuttings, into a scrap book memorializing his mentor, Pu Zhelong. My respect for the contributions of both the illustrator and the editor grew every day we worked together, and I very much hope I succeeded in my efforts not to overstep my authority. That kind of restraint was something of a new experience for me in publishing. Whether or not we deserve it, academic publishers treat scholars with a deference we’re unlikely to find if we venture into the world of children’s literature. The exposure, in all senses, is worth it.

This past semester, a group of graduate students from the history department worked on “Gender, Media, and Access to Audience” as a follow-up to the “Women of Rock” project that Tanya Pearson, PhD student, started in 2014 while attending Smith College. She explains below the origins and the process of this project that received great attention.

My group mates and were assigned to a project: To organize a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon. So they weren’t working on the Women of Rock Oral History Project collection. We just used the interviews as historical context and had intended to create pages for those women on Wikipedia, and to create a subject page for the collection. But we had hoped to focus equally on local musicians. Wikipedia’s rules and regulations created almost impenetrable hurdles and so we organized the two part event, Gender, Media, and Access to Audience.

I’d also experienced Wikipedia’s gender bias, first hand, when I attempted to update pages and create a page for the Women of Rock Oral History Project (all of this is documented in the articles below).

We pitched the event to local media and advertised it on Twitter and Facebook. We had about 40 people attend the roundtable discussion– musicians, publicists, bookers, fans, and one Wikipedia editor. The conversation centered around the gender bias that exists in local media (and larger media outlets), documentation, “notable” sources and grassroots organizing. The live event featured 22 local bands/musicians and was covered by the Valley Advocate–we intended to draw attention to bands who would not normally be granted access to that kind of exposure.

Finally, a female Wikipedia editor from NYC saw our tweets and Facebook posts and created a page for the Women of Rock Oral History Project. She belongs to a group of women wikipedia editors who prioritize creating and updating pages for ‘marginalized’ individuals (women/queer/trans subjects). We’ll be working together, plotting, scheming and making space for women in the future.

When I first walked into the Belchertown Stone House Museum, its potential hit me from all sides. This unique community fixture proudly houses the material and archival history of its community. After an eventful first year in the Public History Program studying museums, asking questions, and seeking answers about the value of historic house museums to the communities they serve, I viewed the Stone House as a canvass for testing, experimenting, and tinkering with potential ideas. Using the house’s spaces, I wanted to explore how the site could better serve its neighbors and visitors alike. Through several weeks of testing the ideological boundaries with Belchertown Historical Association (BHA) board members and the museum committee, my hope remains that I left a positive institutional impact toward the goal of building and sustaining a greater level of visitor and community engagement.

Although the site is only open one day out of the week, core tasks that I undertook included using PastPerfect software to catalogue documents, photos, and objects in the site’s extensive archives, as well as giving tours to visitors. Alongside developing a more simplified, flexible, and institutionally accessible tour script, I catalogued several historical photographs and some new collection accessions. Working only one day on-site proved challenging, but also provided time to study, and later digest, the ebbs and flows of the BHA’s institutional culture. As a very small organization of roughly twenty engaged representatives, all of whom volunteer, management limitations created some difficulty in figuring out my role as an intern. I opted to work on developing and presenting a core institutional message geared toward reevaluating the site’s relevance to its surrounding community, as well as its visitors. For example, I replaced basic “Do Not Touch” signs with wittier, more light-hearted text. Although only a small step, I believe that these minor actions present a more human side of the organization.

In 2015, I set off for south-central Tennessee’s South Cumberland plateau to take up a two-year Mellon fellowship with the Collaborative for Southern Appalachian Studies at Sewanee: the University of the South. The Collaborative, a partnership with Yale, envisioned starting and sustaining multidisciplinary, community-engaged, curricular projects that had place as their focus. In other words: pretty much any public history endeavor would fit the bill.

I had some basic goals for my Mellon project. I wanted it to be something I could begin and complete in two years. I wanted it to be digital. I wanted it to engage local history and memory. I wanted students with different interests and strengths to have meaningful roles to play. Most of all, I wanted to undertake a humanities project that the pragmatic people of the region would see as useful — if not while I was doing it, then at least when it was done. The long and tortuous history of scholars traveling to Appalachia to study its cultures and leave again seemed like another link in the chain of extractive industries and weighed heavily on me; I hoped to contribute something through my work.

I did not arrive as a scholar of Appalachia. I am not even, strictly speaking, a U.S. historian. Prior to Sewanee, my major research and project experiences were in Northern Ireland. When I discussed this opportunity with David Glassberg, my mentor, he said, “You are a scholar of place and memory whose first project was in Northern Ireland and whose second project will be in Appalachia.” I was given a chance to broaden and deepen both my scholarship and my public history practice. It is a rare and wonderful thing to be handed an opportunity to create a project and to have lots of time and money to make it work. The flip side, of course, is that if it fails, fingers are inevitably going to point at you. Hanging my professional identity on the hook made it all a little scary but exciting.

The Places Project emerged and evolved as a crowd-sourced placemaking project. A series of digital maps, it collects, shares and preserves stories of places that matter to the people who live and work on and around “the mountain:” south central Tennessee’s South Cumberland plateau. In eighteen months, it engaged college and high school students and community members to create of a “people’s map” of 600 stories and reflections of significant places and why they matter. During this time, stories were collected, recorded, geocoded, sorted and visualized using Tableau data visualization software. Online maps can be searched by a variety of variables, including community, age, theme, etc. We also constructed a physical map — an aerial photograph of the region with pockets built into it to hold stories and photos and a series of quotations from participants’ stories written on the map itself. We updated a Facebook page, had a website, talked it up on local television and got mentions in local newspapers. It became a topic of conversation and a window into possibilities for local residents to think about and reflect on their stories, their histories and what they want for the future.

What made the Places Project particularly significant was place. The South Cumberland plateau is geographically, historically and culturally uniquely illegible — certainly to outsiders but also to residents. Outcroppings, bluffs and coves mark a topographically diverse landscape, leading to the development of very small communities with little or no interaction with one another. It is sparsely populated and is often described in terms of what is wrong with it: poverty, infant mortality, lack of educational and educational opportunity. And it is home to the University of the South, which was founded on the eve of the Civil War by the Southern dioceses of the Episcopal Church so that young men of Southern stock could get a liberal arts education without leaving the region. The university covers 13,000 acres, provides a liberal arts education, is a major employer and represents a place apart, with gates at its main entrance to sever it from surrounding communities.

The idea behind the Places Project was to change the story of “the Mountain.” It invited people to share what mattered to them in a format that brought experiences and narratives together without collapsing them, privileging some over others or pathologizing their tellers. It did not focus on the university community, nor did it exclude it. By collecting stories at fairs, festivals and heritage events, a large cross-section of residents were able to participate. People gathered around the booth, looked at maps, listened to each other and shared stories and memories. In many ways, the open-ended and organic participatory engagements the project made possible actually performed the very functions and forms cultural memory actually takes within community life —- establishing connections, developing usable pasts, bridging the individual and the group and producing a coherent, if oblique, narrative of community values, worries and aspirations.

The stories themselves ran from quotidian patterns: “This is my favorite place to go for a walk with my mom” to epic life-changing moments: “We got married at this construction site. The Justice of the Peace was the contractor and this was the only time he had to do it, and we really wanted to get married. So now it is our place.” There were many stories of places with historical import — the site of the Irish workingman’s camp in the 1870s, the farms where German prisoners of war labored during World War II, the place where African American convict laborers were housed when they were forced to work in coke ovens, the site of the University’s first spring. Places like the Highlander Folk School, many sites of Jim Crow segregation and a geography of local sites that were erased by the university sit side by side among children’s stories of Grandma’s cooking and memories of the baseball diamond. In this way, controversial places could be reintegrated into the weft and weave of local history.

Some stories were funny. One of my favorites was shared by Mrs. Barbara Mooney Myers. She remembered the place in the yard where her mother hid coffee in an old flour bin, sneaking out to get it every morning after her husband left for work. He was a strict Seventh Day Adventist, but Barbara’s mother always insisted that “nobody was ever kept out of heaven over a cup of coffee.” People told stories about where they collected turnip greens to put on the family table, where they had their first kiss, where their Dad would take them for a Sunday drive. On their own, the stories are interesting. Taken together, they form a complex and rich tapestry of family and cultural history and create a narrative of place that is both a sum of its parts and a story about how those parts coalesce into something in its own right.

The project wanted to avoid simplified and uncritical celebrations of place and its meanings and to complicate and contextualize memories without diminishing the valence they hold. I will continue to work on making observations about the stories themselves and am trying to make sure the project continues and the data already collected can be used locally on the mountain. You can check out the maps here:https://theplacesproject.org/explore-the-maps/ and learn more about how the project evolved here:https://www.facebook.com/theplacesproject/

This summer, Professor Tore Olsson kindly accepted to answer few questions about his experience at UMass and his recent book Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside.

-Adeline Broussan: First of all, could you tell us a bit about you?

Tore Olsson: Sure thing! I’m currently an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee, where I teach modern U.S. history. Considering my personal background that’s a rather unlikely career path – I was born and raised in Sweden and knew essentially nothing about the United States before my family and I emigrated to Brookline, MA, in 1990, at the tender age of eight. However, it wasn’t long before I began to take an interest in American history. I still remember my lovingly-worn trading cards of U.S. presidents from third grade (Franklin Roosevelt was my clear favorite!), and into high school, my favorite classes were always my history classes. But it was really during my years at UMass – 2000-2004 – that I was swallowed whole by history as a discipline and profession, not just a collection of stories. I left UMass with a burning desire to dedicate my life to the study of the past. From there it was on to graduate school at the University of Georgia, where I earned my Ph.D. in spring 2013, and that fall I began work at the University of Tennessee, where I’ve taught since. Coming to the United States as an immigrant, it was a career that few would have predicted!

– AB: What led you to study history at our department and what memories do you keep from your time here?

TO: I came to UMass undeclared, and was uncertain – really quite bewildered – about what sort of career I wanted to pursue. I knew I wasn’t a math or science type, but beyond that I had little clue. Then, during my very first semester, I took my first GenEd history class – Leonard Richards’ early American history survey – and was so enthralled by it. I’ll never forget our discussion of Shays’ Rebellion, the 1780s violent uprising against the new U.S. government right there in my new home of western Massachusetts – an episode that was entirely new to me and really opened my eyes to the messiness and unpredictability of the past.

But I was still reluctant about declaring a history major. I was under the impression that it brought limited career options, and I wasn’t certain I wanted to teach, especially at the high school level. (Having just escaped high school, I had no desire to return!) These are stereotypes that still live on, unfairly, today. But I’ll never forget a life-changing conversation I had in Spring 2001 with an older history major. He gave me the same advice that I now give to all of my students pondering a history major: that it’s a discipline that teaches you to read, write, do intensive research, digest vast amounts of information, make arguments, and communicate them effectively to others – in a nutshell, it prepares you for pretty much every career out there!

Having declared my major, I eagerly jumped into coursework. From the smorgasbord of classes offered, I ate a wide and varied diet. I delved deeper into early American history with Prof. Richards and Gerry McFarland. I think I took every course on modern Europe that Neal Shipley offered. Ann Jefferson gave me my first introduction to Latin American history, which was unlike anything I’d studied before. I took a wonderful honors seminar with Larry Owens on science and the state in modern America – a class that I wish I could retake now, considering my current research interests.

– AB: How did your training at UMass shape you as an educator?

TO: What I love most about my job as a history professor is the research – the painstaking but so incredibly exciting work of sifting through the past to find untold stories or new perspectives on why our world looks as it does. And without doubt, I got my taste for it at UMass! The most transformative experience for me came with my senior honors thesis, which I wrote under Gerry McFarland on the topic of “Bleeding Kansas” – the political violence that tore apart Kansas in the years before the outbreak of the Civil War. I was trying to tell the story of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, a group of antislavery activists who sent settlers to Kansas to vote against the extension of slavery into that territory. I followed the Company’s trail across many floors of the DuBois Library, into newly digitized archives online, and ultimately to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. Digging through dusty books and records and records might seem dull to some, but to me it was a thrilling detective adventure. I’ll never forget checking out a library book whose last check-out date was 1913! During that year, I learned the fundamentals of research that I’ve relied upon ever since.

But my years as a History major also made me who I am as a teacher. I was particularly inspired by the many lecturers who were able to captivate a large room with their wit, humor, and erudition. It is truly my lifelong ambition as a teacher to replicate the on-the-edge-of-your-seat lecturing style of Neal Shipley explaining Jeremy Bentham’s ideas on crime and punishment, or the subtle brilliance of how Larry Owens mediated a discussion of nuclear arms policy in post-1945 America. I still rely upon many of my old UMass syllabi when crafting my own courses, particularly in terms of assignments and projects that seek to stretch the thinking of students.

– AB: Could you tell us about your hot-off-the-press book “Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside”(Princeton University Press, July 2017)?

TO: Absolutely! In many ways my book grows from my personal background. As a Swede studying American history, I’ve always been bothered by studies of U.S. history that seem to think that it played out in a vacuum – as if our country existed on a different plane of existence from the world beyond its borders. I think too many folks draw artificial boundaries around American history that can hide what actually happened in the past.

My book explores how such artificial boundaries have hidden the deep entanglement of U.S. history with Mexican history. Today, I think many Americans consider their nation and Mexico as polar opposites – one rich, one poor, one stable, one chaotic – whose histories have entirely distinct trajectories. The rhetoric of our recent election only reinforced that sentiment. In my book I argue the complete opposite – that the histories of the United States and Mexico share far more than we realize. In particular, I look at the 1930s and 1940s, when rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. In the U.S., this was pioneered by Franklin Roosevelt; in Mexico by its president Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940). My book basically tells the story of how these campaigns were conducted in dialogue with one another, as reformers in each nation came to exchange models, plans, and strategies with their equivalents across the border. It’s very much a book about how Mexican ideas influenced U.S. politics – a very important story to remember today, when the relationship of those two countries seems much more imbalanced.

In spring 2017, alumna Claire Blaylock participated in NextGen 2017, an executive education program for museum leaders offered by the Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University. We asked her to share her thoughts.

This past March I had the pleasure of participating in the Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University. With an eye towards emerging trends in the museum field, I was excited to spend an intensive month interacting with my peers from around the globe and learning from top notch faculty.

Basically, I got to go back to graduate school, but without final papers, late nights in a library, or the questionable contents of the student lounge fridge.

As the director of a small museum and historical society, I immediately felt a little like a fish out of water. I had the smallest budget of all the participating institutions, but I quickly learned that my small museum experience actually gave me a leg up since I am involved in literally every aspect of running the institution. In fact, my colleagues from some of the most prestigious institutions in the world expressed genuine admiration for how we (small museums) manage to accomplish so much with few resources.

Regardless of institution size, we were brought together to dissect the field from all angles and address as a group the challenges we ALL face – funding, organizational development, audience engagement, basic management skills, and how technology is playing a more active role in our field.

Taking a page from traditional business school curriculum, we worked our way through market assessments of our institutions. We learned the basics of business strategy and analysis. We read management analysis of large corporations like Microsoft! Much to my surprise, these types of readings really resonated with me. It provided a framework to start thinking about how my organization can take steps toward greater long-term stability. I frequently find myself going back to these texts on a weekly basis to help guide me in my current role. For example, I have started to lead my staff in creating a basic market analysis of the heritage sites in our community. What are the programs and experiences already being offered? Where do we fit in this market? Is there a niche that we can address and better set ourselves apart from the ‘competition?’ This exercise has been illuminating for our organization and has helped guide us toward new programs and curriculum.

How can we guide our institutions forward with this in mind? One way is to start approaching our field like business people. Institutions from small (local historical societies) to large (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) are concerned with long term stability and the solutions to these concerns need to come from our generation of leaders. Think outside the box and look to other fields for answers. What organizations are successful? Why are they successful? Can you mirror any of their same techniques for success? These types of questions may yield surprising but illuminating results!

Want an easy place to start? Does your organization have a business plan or a strategic plan? If not, then it is time to develop a guiding document! One of the best examples of such a document is the Chicago History Museum Visioning Document. This has inspired organizations large and small to take a more holistic approach to organizational development. It should be required reading for everyone involved in historic institutions.

To the shock of no one, my Next Gen classmates and I came to the conclusion that collections, museums, and organizations can no longer afford to exist as the bastions of antiquarians and enthusiasts – we need have clearly articulated and BOLD vision, missions, and purposes. But just as importantly, we as museum leaders need to be driven by bold vision missions and purposes. The Getty Leadership Institute empowered me to be a stronger leader by giving me access to a whole new tool box of skills. These skills will allow me to take important next steps for my career and the future health of the historic institutions in my community.

In April 2017, a record number of UMass Public History students headed to the annual meeting of the National Council on Public History meeting, held this year in Indianapolis. Our annual gathering of current students, staff and faculty and program alumni brought more than two dozen people together to reconnect with old friends and make new acquaintances. We thought it would be fun to ask the current students who attended the conference about their experiences. Their responses are below!

UMass Public History faculty, students, and alumni join together for dinner at NCPH 2017

What brought you to the 2017 NCPH?

Alex Asal: I attended NCPH once as an undergrad and was totally overwhelmed by everything that was going on. I wanted to make sure and visit now that I’m at UMass and a little more confident in the public history arena so I could really take advantage of all the exciting things happening there.

Shakti Castro: My poster, “Carlos Vega Oral History Project: Documenting Puerto Rican and Latino History in Holyoke,” was accepted for the poster session. I also serve as a committee member on the Diversity Task Force Committee, and had a committee meeting as well as a session for the task force.